Ruengoethe

Gleam-Whale

“Gleam does not describe it. Nor shine, or glow, or any paltry word my mannish tongue knows or can devise. Their light bubbles forth from the ocean as the pack breaches, birthing into the ocean’s night a spark of whatever light was there at the start of creation. And for all its brightness, the patterns of the Old Ones shine through, an eldritch speech guiding us now to the colonized corpses of their cities”
-from The Travels of a Young Bard by Charmaine

Gleam-whales are sea creatures that are, to the best bet of most scholars, a Nonman legacy. They mostly appear as normal whales, except their flesh has glowing geometric patterns upon it that some scholars have concluded to indicate a preset path that the whale takes during its life. Some pods of these whales have been identified as following paths between coastal Nonman cities, and, thusly, the new civilizations that have been built upon them. This discovery has been a boon to sailors, who can follow the light of the Gleam-whales across a vast ocean and find their way to port. The hunting of these whales is expressly forbidden by many governments, but the skin, which continues to glow in arcane patterns even after their demise, is extraordinarily valuable.

Some believe that these creatures are in fact immortal, and have existed since the time of the Nonmen. No young have ever been seen, and it appears as if the pods dwindle with each passing year.